


A Flower Grows in Wakanda

by errantcrow



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Awesome Shuri (Marvel), Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Canon-Typical Violence, Consent Issues, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Erik Killmonger Grows up in Wakanda, Erik has Issues, Erik is a Sweetheart, Everyone Has Issues, F/F, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, M/M, Memory Alteration, Mind Manipulation, Multiple Personalities, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Psychological Trauma, Slow Burn, T'Challa (Marvel) Is a Good Bro, There's A Tag For That, Wakanda, anyway
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-27 09:53:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14422878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/errantcrow/pseuds/errantcrow
Summary: N’Jadaka grows into manhood on the edge of Wakanda in a dot of a village about as different from Oakland as goddamn Mars. Oakland being the place he goes in his dreams. The village is a place where nothing ever changes. Every day he rises, studies and works, watches the sunset, and dreams. And then he forgets.Erik only knows the missions. He goes where other War Dogs can’t, does things no Wakandan-born citizen would, and does it with a grin. Every kill, he marks with a scar, waiting for the day when it is enough, when he will be welcomed home. And then he forgets.And so it goes. Until the king dies, the princess comes to visit, and the white man comes to stay.Or: Screw it. They take kid Erik back.





	A Flower Grows in Wakanda

**Author's Note:**

> They decide to take kid Erik back. Here's what Erik thinks about that.

**** Erik ran. He scrambled through parts of Oakland that his dad would kill him if…if…

His eyes burned. He scrubbed at them with his jacket sleeve. He couldn’t hear them behind him, but he had grown up on fairytales about the Dora Milaje. They had terrified the Greeks. They could track a mouse through a jungle. They could hunt down a kid in Oakland, unless he was very fast, very smart, and fucking lucky.

Erik clambered up and over the iron bar fence of St Agnes and pelted across the lawn. He skidded to a stop by the half moon window of the church basement.He ripped off half a fingernail prying the glass up and open, but he bit his lip and stayed quiet. Silently he dropped down into the dark and shut the window behind him. The room was a nursery. He picked his way over scattered wooden blocks. A knitted blanket lay folded on a shelf. He tucked it under one arm and kept moving. 

The hall that was dark enough in the daytime was like an inky cave in the night. He padded silently down it. He carefully turned the knob on the door, second on the left, and closed it just as gently. In the next room, there was a circle of plastic chairs. It was always arranged like that. Erik took a moment to lay a hand on his mom’s chair. She had sat there in meetings, so she could see the top of his head and the shadows of his shoes if he snuck out of the nursery to see her. 

He remembered peering through the glass in the door a hundred times. Sometimes she made faces. Other times arch mom looks. But every so often she would call a break for the meeting and she would stride over, throw open the door, and throw him over one shoulder. They would go to the chapel and pray, and if they were alone she would sing to him, and it was the best. Then she stopped carrying him. In the end, he was responsible for pushing her wheelchair through the doors. When she was in the hospital, he prayed alone in that chapel for the cancer to go away. To Jesus and to Bast, too. 

He hadn’t been in that chapel or prayed to either, not since…

Erik stepped away from his mom’s chair. He went to the door at the other end of the room. It had a bad lock. He shut it behind him and went down the stairs and into the sub basement. It was pitch black. He felt his way to the boiler mostly by memory and carefully pressed around it. On an October night, the room was piping hot. Sweat ran down his forehead to his cheeks. He rubbed a sleeve cuff under each eye, careful not to touch his skin with his hands, and blinked his eyes hard. It was just sweat. In the dark, in the heat, he dropped the blanket in the cramped corner and wormed out of his jacket. He sat as close to the boiler as he dared. Next all that heat, they might not see his own heat signature. He figured if he could make it until morning, it might be safe enough to leave and find Uncle James. His Uncle could do fuck all against the Dora, but he had some money and a car and even a driver’s license to go with it. Those things and some fast talking might get Erik to Nevada. There was a whole lot of nothing in Nevada to get lost in. 

Morning. Uncle. Car. Nevada. Erik repeated the words in his head until his heart stopped pounding. It took a while. After that, he sat, and he waited. He didn’t pray to Jesus, and he didn’t pray to Bast. He pressed his face into his knees and imagined his mother was bathed in stained glass light, singing. 

_“Hush little baby, don’t say a word…”_

***

_“…momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.”_

Erik woke to parched lips and what felt like an entire hourglass of sleep sand scratching at his eyeballs. He pushed himself up and rubbed at his face. He opened his eyes and made a face at the dark grit on his hand. It was funny though. It didn’t feel dirty, just soft and cool, and the specks flowed and dripped off his hand like water onto a large bed of black sand molded into the shape of a small boy. Erik’s head whipped up. He found himself dead in the sights of a Dora. They were in small room with curved metal walls and a window that showed only blue sky and clouds out to the horizon. 

He scrambled backwards, over the edge of the sand bed, and onto the floor. He rolled and came up on his hands and feet before a man dressed in robes. Erik looked up and sat down on the floor, hard.

“Uncle James?” 

James was dressed like Erik had never seen him, with bangles on his arms and a purple hat crushed between his clenched hands. The clothing Erik had seen before, though. He had worn something with patterns just like it for days after his mother died, a tunic stolen from his dad’s secret chest. The patterns were Wakandan. James was fucking Wakandan.

As Wakandan as the Dora that had walked up behind Erik as he knelt over his father’s corpse, holding his hands against the wounds and screaming for help. At first, Erik had thought that she had come to save them, but she just stood there. She stood there long enough for him to get it through his stupid brain that his father was dead with claw marks in his chest. And while Oakland had monsters, none of them had fucking claws. Wakanda, though?

Yeah. 

James was as Wakandan as the body of his father he’d scrambled over to get away from the Dora. As Wakandan as the blood on Erik’s hands, that he had left in handprints on the floor, the open window, the fire escape rails, and a couple alley walls before taking off in the opposite direction. 

_“Did you kill Father?”_ asked Erik in Wakandan. 

James looked away. That was enough to know. Erik – really N’Jadaka, son of N’Jobu – was not full-blooded Wakandan, but the other Erik that had grown up a church-going, manners, raise your hand in class high, better back up those street smarts with real smarts and make me proud Momma’s boy, he wasn’t there right now. Probably had been left back behind that church boiler in Oakland to die, too.

What was left of Erik roared. He rushed forward. He bit, he clawed, and every small scratch and drop of blood he pulled out of James was worth nothing. The man eventually pinned him down and spoke to him quietly in English. It was apologies and to be calm and a bunch of other things also worth exactly nothing. Erik shouted back in a mix of Wakandan and every other language he know. It adds up to a lot of languages after 10 years of your dad withholding the mac and cheese with a face like stone until you remember how to ask for it in Cantonese or ASL or ancient Greek, because sure, Pops, Odysseus had obviously spent twenty years fighting to get home just to get some of Penelope’s epic cheesy mac. 

Erik could fight for twenty years and he wasn’t ever going to get his family back. They were dead, all of them, and James was dead to him, too. He kept fighting and shouting until everything burned and he had run out of languages. All he had left were hoarse screams and Fuck Yous.

“Stop!” James was finally shouting back. “Erik, just stop!”

“No!” said Erik. “You killed him. You traitor! You said you loved us, and you killed him. Why didn’t you just kill me too, huh?”

James stopped talking.

“Why didn’t you kill me too?” Erik asked again in the silence, and then again. He started sobbing and soon he could only croak out “Why?” in between hiccups and gasps for breaths that came faster and faster. He kept asking after the prick of pain in his neck and as he fell down into the dark.

***

The halfblood prince was light in his arms but Zuri’s heart lay crushed under a mountain. The Dora kneeling before them held an empty tranquilizer in her hand. She said, “He was never going to stop.” She stood. The tranquilizer was dropped into a slot in the med cradle for recycle. She walked back to her post at the closed door to the back of flyer, picked up her spear where she had left it against the wall, and resumed her watch. 

After all the endless shouting, it was a shock that she had only spoken once. He was never going to stop. The words repeated in Zuri’s head. He looked down at the boy. There was blood and dirt under his nails, up to his wrists, and down his jeans. It was on his shoe laces. He had fallen asleep and woken up wearing his father’s blood.

Zuri stood awkwardly and lay Erik down again the med cradle. The micro beads rose up and swirled briefly. They lingered on the thin neck before dropping back to support it gently. It all had to go. Shoes first. Zuri pulled at the crusted laces and pulled off a shoe. It was small in his hands. He chucked it down a chute for recycling, until everything was gone. He found a basin and a sponge. He hadn’t given Erik a bath since he was three and had argued loudly that panthers did not swim. Zuri had bitten his tongue then and didn’t explain why he knew for a fact that they did.

He had kept so many secrets from Erik, and from N’Jobu. Distrust had run deep when the younger prince chose to remain in America, with an outsider, with a child, and Zuri had accepted the call to befriend and to watch. He had watched a loving family for signs of treason, watched Monique wither with cancer, watched Erik while N’Jobu left for reasons he did not say but Zuri knew was to return to Wakanda and beg for Monique’s life. He had watched as N’Jobu returned heartbroken and held her as she slowly died. He had watched Erik grow up, this alien American boy with flashes of true Wakanda that he lied about through his grinning teeth to his Uncle James. 

“Naw, I’m just playin witchu, Unc.” “You so old you never heard that slang before Uncle James? You know, I, uh, think I see some gray hairs up there on your old fart noggin.” “Dude, Malcolm X? Who’d ya think I was talking about?” 

Zuri smoothed the small medical tunic over Erik’s chest. The readouts showed his heart and breathing as labored but improving, and his endocrine system awash in grief and fear. But he looked like any Wakandan child lying there in the soft light of the monitors. Not an “Erik” at all, but a…

Had N’Jobu given his son a Wakandan name? He couldn’t imagine he would leave the boy without one, but he did not know what it could be. The man had kept the secrets of Wakanda from the Outsiders, even from Monique, right until the end. Zuri closed his eyes. Why had his friend done it? Why succeed at every test of loyalty, then break at the end to bring violence and death to their people? It had broken his heart to delete his recommendation to his King that Erik be introduced to Wakanda and instead send news of treason. It had broken again to stare into N’Jobu’s face as he died.And then Erik.To see a child split apart at the seams and a mad creature leap out of the remains, panting for blood.

When Erik woke again, would it just be more of the same? Zuri could not bear it. Part of him wished the boy would lie in the cradle forever and never wake. Or even better, why couldn’t the beast slumber forever and the boy Zuri remembered wake up and smile?

Zuri stilled. He looked to the monitors, then back at the boy. Why not? A prince lay encircled by the most advanced medical technology of the greatest civilization in the world. It could mend bones, cure cancer, even repair brain damage. If it couldn’t save this child, then what was it for?

He turned from Erik and went to the closed door. Its guardian stared at him through kohl-rimmed eyes before permitting him entry. The King was seated in the dark, still in the armor of the Black Panther. His head was bowed. He continued to stare at his hands for a long and did not look up even when he acknowledged Zuri.

“It would have been better if we had left him behind,” said T’Chaka.

Zuri stepped forward before any more tragedies could happen. “What if we only left part,” he asked.

T’Chaka straightened. “Explain,” he said.

Zuri explained.

 

**Author's Note:**

> They decide to take part of kid Erik back. Raise your hand if you know this won't end well.


End file.
